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This meme needs to die. That is one tiny component of the data git touches when working with it. There are many sources of interacting states, some internal to

This meme needs to die. That is one tiny component of the data git touches when working with it. There are many sources of interacting states, some internal to git, some not: the local tree of commits remote trees of commits a possible origin relationship between the two branch labels on each local and remote with possible relationships between them the HEAD label stash index/staging area the actual working directory .gitignore A simple question like which files are being tracked is actually a complex result of several different places in the above. Untracking a file is consequently extremely non-obvious.

nemetroid 3y ago
Each commit in Git contains a file tree. So a single commit is what’s needed to answer the question ”what files does this commit track?”, which is the only question about file tracking that makes sense to ask in Git. Describing Git’s behaviour in terms of other version control systems’ semantics (e.g. Subversion or Mercurial) is not necessarily easy, but that’s not what’s being claimed.
- Certhas 3y ago
  That's incorrect. Git considers files tracked if they are in the last commit or staged. As far as I am aware it considers files untracked if they are not tracked and not ignored (though git clean -x documentation suggests that it considers such files untracked and simply ignores them when listing untracked files, which also makes sense). So un/tracked depends on last commit, staging area and possibly .gitignore. > Remember that each file in your working directory can be in one of two states: tracked or untracked. Tracked files are files that were in the last snapshot, as well as any newly staged files; they can be unmodified, modified, or staged. In short, tracked files are files that Git knows about. > Untracked files are everything else — any files in your working directory that were not in your last snapshot and are not in your staging area. https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Basics-Recording-Changes-to-the-Repository https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Basics-Recording-Changes-...

nemetroid 3y ago

Each commit in Git contains a file tree. So a single commit is what’s needed to answer the question ”what files does this commit track?”, which is the only question about file tracking that makes sense to ask in Git. Describing Git’s behaviour in terms of other version control systems’ semantics (e.g. Subversion or Mercurial) is not necessarily easy, but that’s not what’s being claimed.

Certhas 3y ago
That's incorrect. Git considers files tracked if they are in the last commit or staged. As far as I am aware it considers files untracked if they are not tracked and not ignored (though git clean -x documentation suggests that it considers such files untracked and simply ignores them when listing untracked files, which also makes sense). So un/tracked depends on last commit, staging area and possibly .gitignore. > Remember that each file in your working directory can be in one of two states: tracked or untracked. Tracked files are files that were in the last snapshot, as well as any newly staged files; they can be unmodified, modified, or staged. In short, tracked files are files that Git knows about. > Untracked files are everything else — any files in your working directory that were not in your last snapshot and are not in your staging area. https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Basics-Recording-Changes-to-the-Repository https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Basics-Recording-Changes-...